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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2950 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 24, 2023

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I grew up Catholic, attended mass regularly (though not every week), CCD, was a Eucharistic Minister when I got older, regularly got suckered in to volunteering for whatever events the church was having, and I ended up going to a Catholic college, not one like Georgetown or Notre Dame, but one where the majority of students were Catholic and there was an associated seminary and half the professors were monks and religion courses were required curriculum and multiple friends of mine ended up becoming priests. And during this time I hadn't really heard of Traditional Catholics. I think I first heard of them from an article I read online, which may have been around this time period, but it certainly wasn't anything that was discussed or even mentioned within the church or among fellow Catholics. To the contrary, Vatican II was celebrated by pretty much every priest I had known by that point, and the Latin Mass was viewed as a boring, impenetrable relic that had survived a couple hundred years past its sell-by date among pretty much everyone who had been around while it was still in use. No one, no matter how old or how devout, seemed to harbor any nostalgia for the Traditional Rite. At the most, there was curiosity about it among some younger people, but just that they wanted to participate in one on occasion, not that they wanted it to supplant normal mass. If you grew up in a household that was nominally Catholic but lapsed, and don't have any first-hand experience really living as a Catholic, it's easy to read new articles about Traditional Catholics or see them arguing online and think that this is some kind of deep division in the church, but most practicing Catholics probably have no idea what you're talking about.

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